1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and systems for grouping contact center agents. Such grouping is useful in segmenting a set of agents with similar characteristics in order to route contacts to agents of a particular group and/or for reporting on contact center and agent performance and activities.
2. Description of Related Art
In a contact center (often referred to as a call center) agents have traditionally been assigned to skillset groups. Thus an agent may have skillsets such as “English”, “Portuguese”, “Sales”, “Digital Camera Technical Support”, and so on. These skillsets may be used to define agent groups with contacts being routed to one or more such agent groups either by queuing or by pooling contacts and matching agents to contacts in that pool. The skillset groupings may also be employed for reporting and statistical purposes, so a revenue report might be defined for all agents sharing the skillsets of (say) “Portuguese” and “Sales.”
Current contact center skillset parameters are static. Usually, agents will receive a grade indicating how good or bad they are for a particular skillset. These are the parameters that a routing algorithm can use to move agents from one skill to the other. It requires manual interaction from the supervisor to promote or demote an agent for a particular skillset.
Reconfiguring such agent groups is time consuming and changing an agent's grouping for reporting purposes may impact on unintended areas such as by affecting contact routing. Furthermore, where a new group or skillset is created for the purposes of reporting, agents must be individually assigned to the new group or skillset, or such reassignment must take place by combining and filtering the existing skillset assignments for agents.
One example of a traditional method of organizing an agent queue is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,731,609.
An additional problem arises for alternative models of contact centers. For example, if a contact center is designed to match contacts to agents without the use of traditional skillsets, then the imperative to maintain detailed skillset assignments for each agent no longer exists, and this has a knock-on effect when it comes to reporting as agents cannot be easily segmented and characterised in the absence of skillset assignments.
Events occurring outside the contact center may expose inadequacies in traditional ways of characterising and grouping agents. For example, an airline contact center may have a fixed ratio of sales agents to customer service agents, and perhaps those customer service agents will be assigned to different geographical areas (e.g. East coast, Midwest, West coast, etc.). If a severe weather event occurs on, for example, the East Coast, then this may dramatically alter not only the relative levels of calls between the geographic groups, but also the ratio of customer service calls to sales calls. Reassigning agents to achieve the optimum level of customer service is a difficult and skilled task for experienced supervisors, who will usually be in a “fire fighting” mode where they are reacting and attempting to fix problems that have already manifested themselves in excessive wait times and abandoned calls.